Download or read book Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Louri written by Klara Moricz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié explores the varied aesthetic impulses and ever-evolving personal motivations of Russian composer Arthur Lourié. A St. Petersburg native allied with the Futurist movement and profoundly sympathetic to Silver Age decadence, Lourié was swept away by the Revolution; he surfaced as a Communist commissar of music before landing in Europe and America, where his career foundered. Making his way by serving others, he became Stravinsky's right-hand man, Serge Koussevitsky's ghostwriter, and philosopher Jacques Maritain's muse. Lourié left his mark on the poems of Anna Akhmatova, on the neoclassical aesthetics of Stravinsky, on Eurasianism, and on Maritain's NeoThomist musings about music. Lourié serves as a flawless lens through which aspects of Silver Age Russia, early Bolshevik rule, and the cultural space of exile come into sharper focus. But this interdisciplinary collection of essays, edited by musicologists Klára Móricz and Simon Morrison, also looks at Lourié himself as an artist and intellectual in his own right. Much of the aesthetic and technical discussion concerns his grandly eulogistic opera The Blackamoor of Peter the Great, understood as both a belated Symbolist work and as a NeoThomist exercise. Despite the importance Lourié attached to the opera as his masterwork, Blackamoor has never been performed, its fate thus serving as an emblem of Lourié's own. Yet even if Lourié seems to have been destined to be but a footnote in the pages of music history, he looms large in studies of emigration and cultural memory. Here Lourié's life, like his last opera, is presented as a meditation on the circumstances and psychology of exile. Ultimately, these essays recover a lost realm of musical and aesthetic possibilities-a Russia that Lourié, and the world, saw disappear.

Download or read book The Snow Queen written by Hans Christian Andersen and published by . This book was released on 2013-09-11 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE SNOW QUEEN:Modern EnglishTHIS EDITION: The English edition is a new translation from French. The English translation is in a segmented format as part of a '2Language Books' dual-language project. The story was originally written in Danish.BRIEF SYNOPSIS: The Snow Queen is a series of seven stories originally published in Danish by Hans Christian Andersen. It is about a young girl's journey in search of her special childhood friend. Her little playmate had an abrupt change in his personality, and one day disappeared without a trace: he had fallen victim to the Snow Queen and her wicked ways.The stories include:Which Treats of a Mirror and its Fragments; A Little Boy and a Little Girl; The Garden of the Sorceress; The Prince and Princess; Little Robber-Girl; The Lapland Woman and the Finland Woman; The Palace of the Snow Queen.(A Dual-Language Book Project)2Language Books

Download or read book The Snow Queen written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the Snow Queen abducts her friend Kai, Gerda sets out on a perilous and magical journey to find him.

Download or read book Stravinsky written by Stephen Walsh and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2010-06-09 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This, the second and final volume of Stephen Walsh’s magisterial biography of Igor Stravinsky, begins in 1934, when Stravinsky is fifty-two and living in France. Already regarded by many as the most important composer of his generation, Stravinsky is nevertheless at this point a fairly unhappy expatriate, all too aware of the war clouds beginning to gather. Though he still maintains a family life with his wife and children, much of his time is spent with his mistress, Vera Sudeykina, while traveling around Europe giving concerts in order to earn the money to support his dependents–which include a number of relatives. Composing, of course, remains the center of his existence. But changes are imminent: within only a few years his wife, Katya, will be dead, his family scattered, and Stravinsky himself, together with Vera, starting over again in America. Stravinsky: The Second Exile follows the composer through the remainder of his long life, years during which he produces such masterworks as The Rake’s Progress and Symphony in C, and achieves a new level of fame as a conductor and raconteur in his own right. With a dazzling command of sources in several languages and a keen feeling for accuracy in situations where truth and falsehood have become blurred, Walsh traces and illuminates Stravinsky’s increasingly complex and often agonized family relationships along with his crucially important connection with his associate Robert Craft. Walsh is also, as a musicologist and critic, able to speak with knowledge and wit about Stravinsky’s work, expertly describing and assessing the composer’s musical journey from the neoclassicism of his late French and early American periods, through his early essays in serial technique, and on finally to the astonishing intricacies of his final compositions. The first volume of this biography, Stravinsky: A Creative Spring, was received with glowing praise for its insight, narrative skills, and readability. The period covered here, beset as it is with myths and misconceptions, is handled with even greater authority. Carefully weighed, eloquent, packed with rich and fascinating detail, it casts a brilliant new light on one of the greatest artists of our time.

Download or read book Terror and Greatness written by Kevin M. F. Platt and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-15 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ambitious book, Kevin M. F. Platt focuses on a cruel paradox central to Russian history: that the price of progress has so often been the traumatic suffering of society at the hands of the state. The reigns of Ivan IV (the Terrible) and Peter the Great are the most vivid exemplars of this phenomenon in the pre-Soviet period. Both rulers have been alternately lionized for great achievements and despised for the extraordinary violence of their reigns. In many accounts, the balance of praise and condemnation remains unresolved; often the violence is simply repressed. Platt explores historical and cultural representations of the two rulers from the early nineteenth century to the present, as they shaped and served the changing dictates of Russian political life. Throughout, he shows how past representations exerted pressure on subsequent attempts to evaluate these liminal figures. In ever-changing and often counterposed treatments of the two, Russians have debated the relationship between greatness and terror in Russian political practice, while wrestling with the fact that the nation's collective selfhood has seemingly been forged only through shared, often self-inflicted trauma. Platt investigates the work of all the major historians, from Karamzin to the present, who wrote on Ivan and Peter. Yet he casts his net widely, and "historians" of the two tsars include poets, novelists, composers, and painters, giants of the opera stage, Party hacks, filmmakers, and Stalin himself. To this day the contradictory legacies of Ivan and Peter burden any attempt to come to terms with the nature of political power—past, present, future—in Russia.

Download or read book Under the Sky of My Africa written by Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2006-05-30 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging consideration of the nature and significance of Pushkin's African heritage Roughly in the year 1705, a young African boy, acquired from the seraglio of the Turkish sultan, was transported to Russia as a gift to Peter the Great. This child, later known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was to become Peter's godson and to live to a ripe old age, having attained the rank of general and the status of Russian nobility. More important, he was to become the great-grandfather of Russia's greatest national poet, Alexander Pushkin. It is the contention of the editors of this book, borne out by the essays in the collection, that Pushkin's African ancestry has played the role of a "wild card" of sorts as a formative element in Russian cultural mythology; and that the ways in which Gannibal's legacy has been included in or excluded from Pushkin's biography over the last two hundred years can serve as a shifting marker of Russia's self-definition. The first single volume in English on this rich topic, Under the Sky of My Africa addresses the wide variety of interests implicated in the question of Pushkin's blackness-race studies, politics, American studies, music, mythopoetic criticism, mainstream Pushkin studies. In essays that are by turns biographical, iconographical, cultural, and sociological in focus, the authors-representing a broad range of disciplines and perspectives-take us from the complex attitudes toward race in Russia during Pushkin's era to the surge of racism in late Soviet and post-Soviet contemporary Russia. In sum, Under the Sky of My Africa provides a wealth of basic material on the subject as well as a series of provocative readings and interpretations that will influence future considerations of Pushkin and race in Russian culture.

Download or read book Mapping St Petersburg written by Julie A. Buckler and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-05 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pushkin's palaces or Dostoevsky's slums? Many a modern-day visitor to St. Petersburg has one or, more likely, both of these images in mind when setting foot in this stage set-like setting for some of the world's most treasured literary masterpieces. What they overlook is the vast uncharted territory in between. In Mapping St. Petersburg, Julie Buckler traces the evolution of Russia's onetime capital from a "conceptual hierarchy" to a living cultural system--a topography expressed not only by the city's physical structures but also by the literary texts that have helped create it. By favoring noncanonical works and "underdescribed spaces," Buckler seeks to revise the literary monumentalization of St. Petersburg--with Pushkin and Dostoevsky representing two traditional albeit opposing perspectives--to offer an off-center view of a richer, less familiar urban landscape. She views this grand city, the product of Peter the Great's ambitious vision, not only as a geographical entity but also as a network of genres that carries historical and cultural meaning. We discover the busy, messy "middle ground" of this hybrid city through an intricate web of descriptions in literary works; nonfiction writings such as sketches, feuilletons, memoirs, letters, essays, criticism; and urban legends, lore, songs, and social practices--all of which add character and depth to this refurbished imperial city.

Download or read book Erotic Utopia written by Olga Matich and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2005-08-01 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first generation of Russian modernists experienced a profound sense of anxiety resulting from the belief that they were living in an age of decline. What made them unique was their utopian prescription for overcoming the inevitability of decline and death both by metaphysical and physical means. They intertwined their mystical erotic discourse with European degeneration theory and its obsession with the destabilization of gender. In Erotic Utopia, Olga Matich suggests that same-sex desire underlay their most radical utopian proposal of abolishing the traditional procreative family in favor of erotically induced abstinence. 2006 Winner, CHOICE Award for Outstanding Academic Titles, Current Reviews for Academic Libraries Honorable Mention, Aldo and Jean Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association “Offers a fresh perspective and a wealth of new information on early Russian modernism. . . . It is required reading for anyone interested in fin-de-siècle Russia and in the history of sexuality in general.”—Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, Slavic and East European Journal “Thoroughly entertaining.”—Avril Pyman, Slavic Review

Download or read book The Shape of Apocalypse in Modern Russian Fiction written by David M. Bethea and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Bethea examines the distinctly Russian view of the "end" of history in five major works of modern Russian fiction. Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book The Fallacy of the Silver Age in Twentieth century Russian Literature written by Omry Ronen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1997 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Download or read book The Snow Queen written by Ганс Андерсен and published by Litres. This book was released on 2022-01-29 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Книга представляет собой адаптацию сказки знаменитого датского писателя Ханса Кристиана Андерсена (1805–1875) «Снежная королева» на английском языке. Это одна из лучших сказок великого писателя, широко известная в нашей стране. В ней рассказывается о том, как детская любовь и искренняя дружба помогли развеять злые чары коварной повелительницы снежного королевства.После каждой главы даётся комментарий и перевод трудных слов и выражений, а также упражнения, направленные на проверку понимания текста, отработку лексики и грамматических конструкций, развитие навыков устной речи. Новые слова включены в словарь, который помещён в конце книги.Пособие адресовано учащимся 3–4 классов средних школ, лицеев, гимназий, а также широкому кругу лиц, изучающих английский язык.

Download or read book The Archaeology of Anxiety written by Galina Rylkova and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2007-12-09 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The "Silver Age" (c. 1890-1917) has been one of the most intensely studied topics in Russian literary studies, and for years scholars have been struggling with its precise definition. Firmly established in the Russian cultural psyche, it continues to influence both literature and mass media. The Archaeology of Anxiety is the first extended analysis of why the Silver Age occupies such prominence in Russian collective consciousness. Galina Rylkova examines the Silver Age as a cultural construct-the byproduct of an anxiety that permeated society in reaction to the social, political, and cultural upheavals brought on by the Bolshevik Revolution, the fall of the Romanovs, the Civil War, and Stalin's Great Terror. Rylkova's astute analysis of writings by Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Nabokov, Boris Pasternak and Victor Erofeev reveals how the construct of the Silver Age was perpetuated and ingrained. Rylkova explores not only the Silver Age's importance to Russia's cultural identity but also the sustainability of this phenomenon. In so doing, she positions the Silver Age as an essential element to Russian cultural survival.

Download or read book The Apocalypse of Our Time and Other Writings written by Vasiliĭ Vasilʹevich Rozanov and published by Praeger Publishers. This book was released on 1977-01-01 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Bag zh written by Nicolas Nabokov and published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 1975 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Stray Dog Cabaret written by Catherine Ciepiela and published by NYRB Classics. This book was released on 2007 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Apparently the first original publication from the New York Review imprint (exclusively a reprint house until now), this collection makes an ideally readable introduction to this sometimes forbidding, internationally admired, poetic group. Fin-de-siecle concerns of love in cafés, of sun and song, flirtation and regret, give way to darker worries as the Russian Revolution runs its course: Blok and Boris Pasternak sound particularly effective in Schmidt's libretto-like, clarified versions, while Akhmatova--grown older, immersed in sorrow--proposes a toast to the terrible world we inhabit/ And to God, who never replied. Editor Catherine Ciepela offers a long and useful introduction, along with capsule biographies of Schmidt's eight poets; poet and biographer Honor Moore adds an epilogue. --Publishers Weekly.

Download or read book Petersburg Petersburg written by Olga Matich and published by University of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2010-11-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its founding three hundred years ago, the city of Saint Petersburg has captured the imaginations of the most celebrated Russian writers, whose characters map the city by navigating its streets from the aristocratic center to the gritty outskirts. While Tsar Peter the Great planned the streetscapes of Russia’s northern capital as a contrast to the muddy and crooked streets of Moscow, Andrei Bely’s novel Petersburg (1916), a cornerstone of Russian modernism and the culmination of the “Petersburg myth” in Russian culture, takes issue with the city’s premeditated and supposedly rational character in the early twentieth century. “Petersburg”/Petersburg studies the book and the city against and through each other. It begins with new readings of the novel—as a detective story inspired by bomb-throwing terrorists, as a representation of the aversive emotion of disgust, and as a painterly avant-garde text—stressing the novel’s phantasmagoric and apocalyptic vision of the city. Taking a cue from Petersburg’s narrator, the rest of this volume (and the companion Web site, stpetersburg.berkeley.edu/) explores the city from vantage points that have not been considered before—from its streetcars and iconic art-nouveau office buildings to the slaughterhouse on the city fringes. From poetry and terrorist memoirs, photographs and artwork, maps and guidebooks of that period, the city emerges as a living organism, a dreamworld in flux, and a junction of modernity and modernism.

Download or read book Passport to Paris written by Vernon Duke and published by . This book was released on 1955 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author calls himself a musical Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and here are his memoirs. This book is the story of a symphonic- vs. -stagestruck composer - born Vladimir Dukelsky in a small railroad station in Russia - who wrote a Diaghilev ballet, symphonic music praised by the critics, as well as numerous Broadway hits, including the score to Cabin in the Sky, and the ever-popular tune "April in Paris." Paris is the pivot on which these confessions turn - the full-blown Paris of Christian Berard and Jean Cocteau and "Les Six," of the ballet Russe under its incomparable impresario, Diaghilev. Vladimir Dukelsky fell in love with Paris. He writes vividly and longingly of his life there - of his plush and penniless days; his friendships and quarrels with Prokofiev, the Sitwells, Serge and Natalya Koussevitzky and a host of other luminaries; his encounters with Massine and Balanchine that opened the door to Diaghilev, a commission - and recognition. And then, America. It was the America of the golden twenties and "thirsty thirties" - it was the age that saw the Shubert Follies, the infant Theatre Guild, the movies ground out on Long Island - it was the heyday of Ethel Merman, Bea Lillie, Maurice Chevalier, Ginger Rogers, Noel Coward, George and Ira Gershwin and in all-star bill of other favorites. Popular music was popular as never before and Vernon Duke knew he had a knack for tunes. Through it all, Dukelsky pulled against Duke - acclaim mounted in Europe; battle was pitched in Boston with Koussevitzky; Evelyn Hoey sang "April in Paris" in Walk a Little Faster, which starred Bea Lillie; Hollywood nodded; Gershwin and Prokofiev each demanded another score. An irresistible lyricist hove on the scene in the person of Ogden Nash, with whom a lifelong friendship developed. It was a madcap merry-go-round of ups and downs, frantic friends, strong emotions involving a number of women. Vernon Duke loved every minute of it, and he writes with often startling candor both of his own checkered career and those of the figures he has known. This book beats out a lively syncopation of wit and gusto and off-beat memories, extending a handsome invitation to meet the theatrical and musical greats of the past three decades - and to share in the indefinable magic of the city everyone loves best. --Dust jacket.